


The Old Stone Kingdom

by Ruusverd



Series: Echoes of the Fall AU [12]
Category: Echoes of the Fall - Adrian Tchaikovsky, Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-15
Updated: 2020-08-15
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:02:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,572
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25915546
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ruusverd/pseuds/Ruusverd
Summary: Ciri wants to prove herself, and does something very foolish.
Relationships: Cirilla Fiona Elen Riannon & Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia
Series: Echoes of the Fall AU [12]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1863010
Comments: 7
Kudos: 15





	The Old Stone Kingdom

**Author's Note:**

> I don’t do “soundtracks” for fiction, but this is one of two or three nonconsecutive sections of this series that I wrote on the same day while listening to “The Yawning Grave” by Lord Huron on loop (thanks ADHD). I’m sure there’s a lyric video on YouTube somewhere if you want the whole atmospheric experience I had writing it, lol.

Ciri and Lem leaned over the side of the boat and watched the shore sliding by. Ciri felt like shouting with glee at how fast they were moving without any of them having to walk a single step. The oarsmen had to work to push the boat north against the current, but the two Plains girls had been deemed too small to manage the long poles.Their progress seemed virtually effortless to Ciri, particularly after their difficult journey on foot across the Plains.She had decided within the first hour that she never wanted to travel anywhere ever again unless she could go by boat.

Jaskier, unfortunately, didn’t share her opinion of river travel. He’d been violently ill almost from the moment they’d boarded. Ciri had been worried, but Geralt explained that the rocking motions of traveling by water made some people nauseous, and Jaskier would be fine once he either got used to it or they were back on solid land.

The Crow had been excused from rowing because he couldn’t do it without vomiting over the side, but Cahir and Geralt both took turns with the Horse people at pushing the boat along. The Horse didn’t seem to like Cahir much, likely because he came from the Sun River Nation, but that didn’t bother Ciri. She was still determined not to like him either, even if she wasn’t really scared of him anymore.

Everything she’d seen since they reached the river was so different from anything she'd known. It made her memories of the Xin’trae feel like something distant and not quite real. She had no complaints about that, after the destruction of her home and the nightmares that followed Ciri would be perfectly happy to never see the Plains again. She turned her back to the waving grasses to the east and faced the mountainous west bank instead.

The ruins of a giant stone city slid into view just as the sun started to set, the low angle of the light throwing strange shadows from the worn carvings in the rock. Ciri and Lem had never seen buildings made of such huge carved stones before, and gaped at them in astonishment.

“Geralt!” Ciri tugged on his sleeve, “Can me and Lem go explore those ruins when we make camp?”

“No, you cannot!” Geralt said sharply, expression uncharacteristically stern. Ciri pulled back, stung, and Geralt’s face softened apologetically. “That’s the Old Stone Kingdom, Ciri. It’s a very, very dangerous place. Great evil was done there. No one ever sets foot inside the gates unless they wish to risk a fate worse than death. It would be even more dangerous for you since you don’t have a soul yet. I don’t want you to go in there for any reason, understand?”

“It’s cursed,” Jaskier croaked from where he sat propped against the side of the boat. “Destroyed by the Rat cult, and the evil lurks in the stones even all these centuries later.” He fell into the cadence of a storyteller, though without quite as much energy as he usually put into his tales, “The Old Stone Kingdom was the most powerful nation in the world in its time, but seven consecutive years of famine was too much for even their mighty kingdom to weather. And everywhere that there is hunger, fear, and despair, the cult of the Rat creeps in.

“The people went mad, gave up their own gods for the Rat, and tore each other apart in their fear and desperation. A remnant of the Stone People survived and escaped to build a new kingdom, but it is lesser than the old and the people serve the River Lords, for their great city is lost to them forever. It is a place of death, a place of the Rat.”

Ciri shuddered. The story sounded awful, but she didn’t know whether to believe him or not. Or how much of it to believe. There were places on the Plains, places of the vanished Horn Bearers, where no one went because of the Rat, but those were small forts and keeps. A place as massive as a whole kingdom being cursed by something as small as a Rat didn't seem possible. And she knew the stories Jaskier told weren't always very accurate. Even the fact that the other adults were nodding in agreement with this particular story didn't mean anything; her grandmother’s hunters had frequently teamed up to trick the village's children into believing scary things that weren't true.

_How do they know it’s still cursed,_ Ciri wondered, _if no one ever goes there?_ Maybe people were only scared of the ruins because they didn’t know any better. Maybe the city was like Geralt. He looked like one of the mean, savage northmen from the stories with his long iron shirt and his strange eyes and teeth, but he’d rescued her, and he didn’t bite Jaskier or Lem even when they teased him. He taught her how to fight, and let her sleep curled up against his Stepped form when she had nightmares. Maybe the city just looked scary from a distance, too.

As the boats pulled over towards the bank  for the night , Ciri looked at the ruins and  thought about how e veryone said the Wolf valued strength and bravery  above anything else .  She wasn’t very strong yet, but exploring an ancient cursed city would be very brave. 

While everyone set up camp and  sat down for their evening meal, Ciri told herself that the Wolf would be watching her extra carefully, since she had been born in the wrong tribe and didn’t look like  the rest of his people. She would have to be more brave and more strong than anyone if she wanted to impress him  enough for him to send her one of his souls . 

By the time  they had finished eating and settled down to sleep, she was firmly convinced that she  _had_ to go see the city,  or the Wolf would think she was a coward  and not send her a wolf’ s soul when it was time for her to Step .  _I’ll just go to the gate,_ she thought,  _Geralt didn’t say I couldn’t go_ to  _the city, just that I shouldn’t go_ in. 

For once she was glad she  hadn’t hit her growth spurt yet . It made it easy for her to sneak away from the camp under the noses of the Horse people who were standing guard. They were watching for people coming to attack the camp, they weren’t expecting a very small person to sneak out.  Carefully she climbed onto the cargo boat tethered in the river and crossed to the far rail. The craft was  wide enough to get her past the fastest part of the river, and she thought she could swim the rest of the way. 

For a moment after she slid over the side of the boat into the water she feared she’d miscalculated. She knew how to swim, but none of the sources of water near the Xin’trae village had such a strong current. The boat had gotten her far enough across that she managed to pull herself out on the far bank, but she’d been carried farther downstream than she’d expected. She looked down at her dripping clothes and belatedly realized she wasn’t going to be able to hide her nocturnal excursion.

_Oh well,_ she thought resignedly,  _i_ _f I’m going to get in trouble either way_ _I might as well go on._ She wandered north  along the shore  until she found eroded steps carved into the rock that seemed to lead upwards towards the city  gate .  The steps were steep and broken in places, and she was out of breath by the time she reached the top. When she reached the  gate , she saw that the  main part of the  city was built into a long narrow valley cut into the mountain. Doorways and windows were carved into each side, like many houses stacked on top of each other.  The stone was elaborately carved  on every surface , but all the figures had been defaced so that she couldn’t tell what sort of people and animals they had originally portrayed.

Despite her plan to stop at the gate, she found herself wandering down the dead street, peeking though the gaping doorways. The buildings remained relatively intact despite their long abandonment, but everything she saw inside the houses had been smashed to bits. The broken remains looked as if they had been gnawed by thousands of tiny teeth.

She kept hearing skittering, scratching noises behind her, but every time she turned to look there was nothing there. She was suddenly struck with the strong desire to find somewhere small and dark to hide, to stay unseen, to guard herself and lash out at anyone who came near. On some level she recognized that the impulse wasn’t her own, but she felt it nonetheless. She wondered if that was how it felt to have a soul, another set of instincts working underneath the human mind. She hoped not. Having a soul was supposed to feel natural and right, and this felt wrong and twisted.

She saw an especially large opening in the rock and  headed for it. She looked inside and saw that i t was the  mouth  of a tunnel that led deep into the earth, farther than she could see by moonlight. She desperately wanted to run away, back to the camp and her friends and away from this place of scratching and gnawing noises with no source and  thousands of  tiny eyes that she couldn’t see but felt were there  watching her . She walked  into the tunnel instead. 

She’d almost reached the end of the light when she was violently grabbed from behind and hauled off her feet. She shrieked in surprise, the strange trance broken. She struggled and kicked until she realized it was Geralt’s arm around her waist, and he was carrying her back towards the gate at a dead sprint. His arm dug into her ribs uncomfortably, but no matter how much she squirmed he didn’t relax his hold or stop to shift her to a better position. 

He ran through the gate  without pausing,  and  pelted down the  worn  stone stairs at a reckless speed. Ciri held her breath, afraid to move lest she throw him off balance and cause them both to fall and dash their brains out on the stone. 

Geralt paused at the riverbank only long enough to roughly  sling her around  on to his back, and then  jumped into the water, swimming  hard for the eastern bank. Ciri caught a brief glimpse of  a group of people  waiting on the other side before the water splashed into her face, making her cough  and splutter . Ciri clung to his shoulders desperately, squeezing her eyes shut to keep the river water out.

When they reached the far shore Geralt crawled out of the river on all fours, and fell onto his side to dump Ciri off his back onto the ground. He was taking deep shuddering breaths and shaking. Ciri stared at his back blankly until the Hawk woman, Milva, tugged her up by one arm and hustled her away to get dried off and change clothes behind some large bushes nearby. The dry clothes had been made for some child of the Horse Society, but Milva insisted no one would mind if she borrowed them. 

Lem hovered a few feet away, looking worried and for once not acting like the whole world was a joke created for her amusement, “You scared us, Lion girl,” she said roughly. “I  got up to go  p iss and you were gone! We didn’t know where you went, and I never saw that Iron Wolf so mad! I thought he was going to rip the camp guards’ throats out right there!”

“How did he find me?” Ciri asked numbly, no longer entranced but still feeling like her mind was full of fog. She let Milva wring the river water out of her hair, even though she knew the vigorous twisting would make it frizzy later.

“I followed your scent to the edge of the boat while everyone else was yelling. I thought maybe you drowned! Cahir went to look for you downstream and the rest of us checked the banks until we found where you’d climbed out on the other side. Then Geralt followed your scent from there into the city. I wanted to go with him, but they wouldn’t let me,”

“Rightly so,” Milva interjected, tugging the dry shirt over Ciri’s head and pushing her arms into the sleeves. “Bad enough having to rescue one idiot child without letting another one go in that cursed place. Don’t you know any better than to go where the Rat cult has been? At _night,_ no less? Even adults are swallowed up whole by places like that, and you don't have your soul yet to help shield you. You might as well have put a knife to your own throat."

"Then why did we camp so close?"  Ciri snapped, feeling  numbness wearing off and  wanting it to come back .

"Because it's  not dangerous unless you  _walk right in,_ and we didn't think anyone here was that stupid."

Ciri burst into tears. Milva's hands froze, a nd she looked a bit guilty, like she thought she’d made Ciri cry by calling her stupid . Ciri was sobbing too hard to tell her she didn't know why she was crying. Milva and Lem exchanged  concerned  glances, then Lem  grabbed her arm and tugged her back to the camp. 

Geralt was sitting cross-legged on the ground by the fire, also wearing borrowed  H orse clothing. His hair hung loose in wet tangled clumps. She wasn't sure if he'd lost the leather  head band in the river or  if he’d taken it off afterwards. He looked up as Lem approached with Ciri and grunted in surprise when Lem  dumped Ciri in his lap then turned and walked away  without a word . Ciri wanted to laugh but she was still crying too hard.

Geralt wrapped his arms around her and let her hide her face against his chest. He felt warm, and Ciri realized this was the first time he'd held her without  his metal shirt in the way.  She waited for him to start yelling, or to box her ears like her grandmother would have done if Ciri  had disobeyed her and done something foolish and dangerous , but Geralt  just  sat like a statue , staring silently at the flames  and letting her cry .  She wished he’d say something, even if he was angry.

Eventually she ran out of tears, and Geralt shifted to lay her down on the ground, still without saying a word. He laid down beside her, with one arm tucked around her so she couldn’t get up without waking him. Ever since he’d rescued her, he’d always slept in Stepped form and let her rest holding on to the wolf. The thought that he’d reversed their positions because he didn’t trust her anymore made her feel worse than if he’d yelled.

She lay there awake for a long time . From the tension she could feel in Geralt’s arm, he wasn’t sleeping either.  Finally exhaustion won out and she fell asleep, too tired even for bad dreams.

**Author's Note:**

> The Rats in the Witcher aren’t in the same league of horrifying as the Rat cult in Echoes of the Fall, but they both represent desperate, fearful people giving up hope, turning on other people and doing terrible things in an attempt to survive, so there are thematic parallels I think.


End file.
